Steinbeck’s Complicated American Imagination (PAMLA)
Seattle Washington
Event: PAMLA
Categories:
American, Literary Theory, African-American, Colonial, Revolution & Early National, Transcendentalists, 1865-1914, 20th & 21st Century
Event Date: 2026-11-12
to 2026-11-15
Abstract Due: 2026-05-25
This panel invites discussions of Steinbeck's complicated imagination of American life and
culture in his novels and nonfiction. Alternately fraught and adoring, critical and laudatory, his
works attend with specificity to Americanness as a unique and discernible identity in the first
half of the twentieth century. Especially encouraged are papers that attend to the tensions and
disjunctures in Steinbeck’s descriptions of American society, including his treatment of gender,
decolonial readings of his novels, and approaches that expose often contradictory relationships
that extend among people, places, and power in his body of work.
Dr. Sarah Tanner